Santi Forest Monastery

Hey all,

As you would have known if you had read my previous post, I went to Santi Forest Monastery, a Theravadian Buddhist monastery located in Bundanoon -- roughly 3 hours of train-ride south west of Sydney -- for a short 10-day retreat.

I went with an open and excited mind. I looked forward to what Santi had to offer. To me, it felt like a new adventure (albeit a little quiet and flat since it's a meditation adventure...). Having forced myself to wake up at 5.30am, I made my way with my one luggage bag, one sleeping bag and one backpack to Central station for my 6.45am train. Initially, I planned on walking all the way from Forest Lodge (where I'm staying at the moment), but after a draining start, I knew I couldn't make it in time. After 3 hours of mild pain (my bleeding heel), change of trains, and buses, I arrived at Bundanoon Station.



My bleeding heel



The beautiful rural country!




My companions

 Santi was a 3km walk from the station. With no one to pick me up, I had to walk the entire way for 45 minutes with my heavy luggage. I had no idea how I managed to do it, but I did. I got to Santi right before lunch -- which was the only big meal of the day at 11am. Upon arrival, I made some new friends who were extremely kind and friendly to me as they showed me the customs at Santi, which includes receiving blessings from the monastics and in return offering food and drinks to them.
After lunch, caretaker Chandra showed me to my bedroom, which turned out to be a caravan in the middle of the forest. When I first walked there, I didn't even know if I could find it by myself if I were to walk there by myself. In the sunny afternoon, my caravan looked fine and I didn't expect any troubles from it.



My caravan!

 Following that, I had 3 hours of free time before the evening scripture (Sutta) class. Though many people went for their own meditation, I decided to stay in the library to explore their vast collection of books on Buddhist and some other topics including Pali and other religions.

At 4pm, we had our Sutta class. It was basically a class given by the abbot Bhante Sujato on the Buddhist suttas (scriptures/recordings of what the Buddha taught). These were pretty interesting as Bhante, who is very much a scholar in Ancient Buddhism, discussed the parallels and differences between the different language versions of the chapters (due to Buddhism's spread over many countries, there are many versions of different languages -- Chinese, Pali and Tibetan mainly).

Next up came teabreak, which was a small substitute of dinner, but we could only take limited food such as chocolate, dried ginger, marshmallows and drinks. Having used to eating dinner daily, I was still hungry after the teabreak, but could not help myself to something more filling without breaking the rules.

After having a short shower, I retired to my caravan at 8.00pm and went to bed. Gosh, it was then that I realised that Bundanoon was freezing at night! What's more, because Santi's in the middle of a forest, I was surrounded in complete darkness. I tried waving my hand 15cm away from my face but I was only confronted by darkness. With a torch that Simon (a fellow guest at Santi) gave me, I managed to navigate to my caravan miraculously and went to bed. Wrapping myself in two layers of thick blanket, I still couldn't get warm. It was almost torture. I woke up several times in the night due to the uncomfortable cold, each time wishing that it'd be morning. When morning finally came, I thought to myself: I won't be able to suffer through this for 10 days...!

The next morning, I told the accommodation nun that I couldn't stand the cold the previous night. She told me to grab a hot water rubber bag. And I followed her instructions that night and found that it was a lot easier to go to sleep, but like the previous night, I woke up many times in the middle of the night because my hot water rubber bag has turned cold.

The next night, I decided to move and temporarily brought my sleeping bag to sleep in the sala (meditation room). As it was inside the building, it was warmer. However, there still wasn't heating, and so again, I woke up many times in the middle of the night. That was 3 days of almost sleepless night I had. I didn't know what to do. I needed some warmth.



My freezing bed

 So on the fourth day, I went on a last-minute-planned trip to Wollongong in the morning. I left Santi for the bus at Bundanoon station at 6.05am. The details of this trip will be narrated in another post, but do know that I find Wollongong a GREAT city -- one which I would actually not mind settling in, in the future. At Wollongong, I got my much needed warmth, and I went back to Bundanoon that night with a promising mentality.

The next week at Santi flew by much smoother than the first 3 days as I finally found the best place to sleep in -- which was in the library by the fireplace. In fact, sleeping turned from the most dreaded activity to my most favourite/comfortable activity at Bundanoon. It was so warm and nice sleeping next to the fire that I didn't ever want to move back to my caravan again. The only thing that I had to make sure was to sleep after everyone has left the library at night and wake up before anyone enters in the morning.

My time at Santi followed pretty much the same schedule everyday. Wake up at around 5.30 - 6am in the morning, breakfast from 6.30 - 7.30am, work hours from 7.30 - 11am, lunch and cleanup from 11 - 1pm, individual meditation/reading time from 1 - 4pm, occasionally sutta classes from 4 - 6pm, tea break from 6 - 7pm, and free time pretty much after.

Though the accommodation and food at Santi were free, we had to work to maintain the place and prepare lunch for the monastics. Over the days I were there, I was involved in a range of work including cooking, washing dishes, cleaning the library and kitchen, clearing weed grass, moving fallen trees, moving rocks/sand.


Even the monks had to work!




Cooking!

 I learned so so much during my short slightly-more-than-a-week's stay at Santi. I learned to become a better cook as well as to become a mentally stronger worker/student. I also learned lots about the Buddha's teachings during my time there as I spent quite a bit of my time reading books including the Dhammapada. Admittedly, I also learned to appreciate vegetarian food and almost considered becoming a vegetarian. Additionally, I experienced the lifestyle that I would never experience back in the city -- Bundanoon was so rural, on one occasion I actually saw a large kangaroo just hopping on the street! I also made a lot of friends, from different backgrounds. Due to all of these reasons, my short stay felt like 2-months as I now think back in retrospect.



Marcus, Simon, and I




Martin and I



Marian and Beatrice